An Example of a Domain Name Scam

I received an e-mail today from a domain name registrar saying that someone was trying to register my domain name in China. Fortunately I have seen a lot of these before and so I know it is something to simply ignore. This is a well known scam. If you receive something like this please do not reply to it and certainly don’t buy any services from the sender!

Unfortunately there are a lot of similar things going around, including various official looking “invoices” from dubious companies in relation to trade mark or patent “registration” services. If you are ever in any doubt about the veracity of anything like this that you receive just run it by your patent attorney.

Here is the text of the e-mail:

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a formal email. We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on July 25, 2013 that a company claimed XXX were applying to register “scintilla-ip” as their Brand Name and some scintilla-ip Asian countries top-level domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we would finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally finish the registration for XXX. Looking forward to your prompt reply.